by Nina Malkin
Okay, I’m beginning to see why Antonia’s so servant abhorrent.
“She discarded the gown, chose another, and then began to pretend she entertained a suitor. Here, her manner changed very much!” Sensibilities sullied anew, Antonia again clutches her collar. “The things she said—the most salacious things! Acts she intended to . . . perform on the man. Deeds she desired him to do upon her. In the most deplorable detail. Even you would have found it obscene, Dice.”
Even me, huh? She must’ve been something, that Mae Molly.
“Distraught, I ran in and threw myself at her. We tussled . . . tangled. She was strong, and moreover terribly tricky. She gasped and pointed over my shoulder, and when I turned she got ahold of my hair, yanking out a skein.” A ho and a dirty fighter. Gracious!
“All the while she giggled, like this was jolly sport. How long it went on, I know not, but at one point she seemed to have had enough, shoving me down on the mountain of dresses, holding me fast with her knees and hands. ‘’Tis evil to peep, Miss Antonia,’ she said in her own coarse brogue—if you can imagine she accusing me of wrongdoing! ‘Ye shall burn in hell fer it!’ Then she got up, turned on her heel, and left me there.
“Shocked though I was, I ran at once to my escritoire. A note to my mother was in order, exact without being indelicate, telling her what had transpired. Yet when I found the Lady Anne in the salon, Mae Molly was already there. I stormed in and presented my note, watched as my mother read it—and then the two of them fell to laughing, almost to the point of tears. Suffice it to say no action was taken against the foul creature. She was there in Forsythe Manor on my own dying day.”
Catfights, subterfuge, hysteria—contemporary television has nothing on Swoon in the 1760s. A girl of Mae Molly’s distinction has my psychic sense pinging, so much as I’d enjoy the spectacle of Antonia hunkered down with the toilet brush, I leave Marsh to supervise home ec and set out to dig up a little more data on the Forsythe ladies maid.
LIX
Gas is in fact for sale at Libo’s Gas & Lube. There’s also a mini-mart where you can purchase cookies and condoms in dusty packages dating back to 1987. Basic car maintenance (the as-advertised lube job, plus oill changes, tune-ups, and such) are less readily available since Kurt’s father had a paralyzing stroke last winter; Kurt doesn’t stoop to such tedium. For the most part, the garage is a front for Libo the younger’s drug operation and a base for his true love and main means of support: auto restoration.
There’s Kurt now—visible from the shins down, the rest of him cursing under the classic Cutlass I know well. Hopping off my bike, I try to slip past him, but even deep in mechanical concentration, Kurt can scent a female vibe. He rolls out on that wheeled contraption called, appropriately, a creeper and blocks my path.
“Heyyyy, Dice.” Still prone, to afford himself that angle on my crotch.
I block his view with my handlebars. “Sin around?” Kurt sits up. “Still sacked out like a rock star, probably. Me being a working stiff, I’m up and at ’em.” He twiddles a ratchet around his thumb. “Trying to get this bitch up and running for the big day.”
The big day. I’d like to ram that ratchet so far up his left nostril it comes out his right ear. “I’m going to go see him, if that’s all right with you.”
“Go ahead. Give him with a big, wet, juicy one for me.” If only he’d creep back under the chassis where he belongs, but I know he’ll be catching my rear-view stride. I make it wiggle free and take the iron stair. Firmly, I knock.
No answer, but the door’s unlocked, so I go in. My boy’s on the middle of his mattress, cross-legged, eyes shut, breathing long.
Wonders really will never cease. First I dive off a cliff, and now Sin Powers practices meditation. It’s more than rude to interrupt someone seeking inner peace; it’s potentially disorienting, so I carefully lower to the edge of his bed and try to chill until he’s done. Which isn’t easy. Sin’s in black socks, tightie-whities and the slightest trace of smile. Shame on me! Here he’s connecting to his higher self, and my mind’s in the gutter.
A few minutes pass, and he finds me there. He says my name, I say his. We agree that it’s good to see each other.
“To what do I owe the pleasure?” he asks.
“Can we take a walk or something? This place icks me out.” It’s true, the memory of my last and only visit is a grease stain on my consciousness, but apparently Sin laid down the law. I wouldn’t want to lick the tiles or anything, but the apartment is clean, especially compared to conditions at 12 Daisy.
“Of course.” He slides into jeans, buckles his belt, pulls on boots and PWT.
The Gas & Lube sags forlornly on the southern edge of town.
Go straight and you’re on the road less traveled to Norris; turn left—as we do—for a country lane to nowhere. Purposefully I keep just enough distance between Sin and me. It’s our first occasion alone since he spoke of love on my front lawn, and much as I’d enjoy holding hands as we amble—much as I’d prefer to swap ambling entirely for kissing—I need to do this.
Still, I stall, prolonging the precious just-us-ness.
“You seem different, Dice,” he says, stroking his chin in appraisal.
Dare I share the journey gem, the deity throw-down, the surge it instilled when I sang? So tempting to tell the one I love, but what had Fracas cautioned: The more you divulge, the more you dilute. Not till I’ve put my skills into action, successfully or not, can I unveil their source, even to him.
“Amplified yet not louder,” my boy goes on. “Magnified yet no larger . . . Enlightened, then?”
“Me?” I counter. “You’ve transformed Libo squalor into a zen den and I’m enlightened?”
A half smirk of acknowledgment. “Remarkable what a mantra and a can of Lysol can do. But truly, ever since Chester. . .” Maybe he senses my hesitance, and he respects that.
“Perhaps it’s just the haircut beginning to settle in.” I rake my fingers through it, an ideal segue. “So . . . Sin . . .” I bring it up casually, like she was a mutual friend from seventh grade. “Do you remember Mae Molly?”
“Mae Molly!” I thought I’d seen it all when I saw Sin Powers meditating—now I see Sin Powers blushing. “The Mae Molly?
Mae Molly O’Rourke? Well, I . . . how do you . . . of course I remember Mae Molly,” he finally spits out. “There wasn’t a swain in Swoon she failed to impress.”
Sin looks off to the copse of trees a few yards ahead; then he looks back at me. “Dice, when you and I first met, face-to-face, hands in hands, I told you of my life, what led me to this town.”
It was late on the night of the Williams brothers’ party. Sin and I under the fateful ash tree on the Swoon village green.
“At one point, I proposed to veer off on a tangent. ‘Spare me the details,’ you said. ‘Just paint the picture in broad strokes.’” That’s right, I did, with a twinge that embarrassed me.
After all, I didn’t even know Sin—why the jealousy? Now, approaching the shade of the copse, following the questions as always, I suppose I ought to learn the answer to the one he so roguishly posed: “Shall I regale you with the tale of how I lost my virginity?”
He’d been headed west. Some hundred miles east, his home and business lay in ashes, but Sinclair Youngblood Powers was making peace with that and had set his sights on the frontier.
A pipe dream, perhaps—for he was down to his last coin when he entered the tavern in a town called Swoon and met Elijah O’Rourke.
“You are a smithy, Sinclair? What luck!” Good fortune for the knacker—the fellow who made harnesses—for he’d recently lost his partner. “It has been a long month since Emmett Welsh keeled over at the forge, God rest his soul. But you would do well here, lad!” O’Rourke laid a fatherly hand on the young man’s shoulder. “The farrier shop is all set up. You need only hang a shingle.”
“An attractive offer, but I am headed west,” Sinclair explained, firm of conviction if not finances. “I’ve
heard well of Ohio.”
The knacker nodded agreeably. “Aye, many horses need shoes out there.” He drained his tankard and told the traveler, “But you must be tired and hungry this Sunday. Come have supper at my home, stay the night, and start fresh in the morning.” How generous of O’Rourke, who had a welcoming wife, a passel of boisterous offspring, a well-spread table, and a full keg from the tavern. Most of all, O’Rourke had a niece—she just arrived from Ireland.
“I am most happy to know ye, Sinclair.” A study in contrast she was: curvaceous of figure with small, childlike hands and feet. Jet tresses against fair skin. A heart-shaped face with round, wide, lash-lavished eyes, but the eyes were a cool celadon, a changeable, challenging color. Sculptured lips that looked demure when pressed, yet when parted, revealing many tiny, bright teeth, showed a mouth that knew pleasure.
“And I am most happy to know you, Mae Molly.” Had O’Rourke enacted connivance when he invited the stranger to dine? Or was it fate that brought the newcomers together? There is no answer save to say that by the time Mae Molly sang an old Gaelic tune while clearing the table, a deal was struck. Sinclair Youngblood Powers would stay awhile.
An enterprise flourished and a courtship kindled. The couple would meet in the blacksmith shop by night, the forge cooling, their passions flaring.
“Kiss me here,” she would whisper, and he would obey. “Ah, like that—just like that.”
She was his first kiss. He was her best kiss. Sometimes he would experiment. Sometimes she would direct. As long as they kept to kissing, they got along fine.
Trouble was, Mae Molly talked too much. For one thing, she schemed. Always about how Sinclair might improve his station—ingratiating himself to the town’s founders, becoming active in the Congregationalist Church. She had her own sights set, as well—easy work in a wealthy house, inveigling her mistress.
For another thing, she promised. Mostly along the lines of “I shall make a man of ye, Sinclair.” Allusions to a treasure between her legs, a secret honeypot that would be his alone.
A treasure that would cause great pain to give, but pain she’d suffer gladly. A treasure that, once plundered, would forever renew—he could come, again and again, and find his strength there, his very reason for being.
“When?” he would ask, his mouth demanding, his eyes deep as mines.
“Soon,” she would swear, her cool eyes glittering, her mouth a trophy cup.
Until came the night he took what she promised. She did not stop him. Rather, she clung and ground and bucked in wild, mad rhythm. With her throat arched and her eyes slit and her lips parted, indeed. Cooing and sighing and then crying out, then cooing and sighing again. Mae Molly hadn’t exaggerated—this was a treasure!—and Sinclair so young to be the recipient. Yet when it was over, she slapped his face so hard he feared a tooth or two might have made it to Ohio without him.
“You have ruined me,” Mae Molly said.
Still, on the next Sunday, when Sinclair came to O’Rourke’s for supper, Mae Molly seemed in fine form as she entertained another. Some pasty, paunch-bellied, chinless lad he recognized—the clerk at the general store. Stealing a moment by the hearth, he urged her to expound upon this guest.
“He is not but the clerk; he is nephew to the owner and possible heir.” This she told him tightly, then adding a twist to her chiseled lips, “Not a half-breed savage nor bastard of ill repute!”
It was the last Sunday Sinclair would spend at O’Rourke’s table.
And the last he saw of Mae Molly till his commission at Forsythe Manor—apparently she’d achieved her coveted position there. When Sinclair arrived to show the magistrate designs for the garden gate, she passed him in the foyer. He greeted her with subdued courtesy, but she bore through him with her glacial green stare as if they’d never tarried. Once his labors began in earnest, she bustled to his temporary forge.
The rendezvous was brief. “Ye don’t know me, ye hear?” Mae Molly hissed. “Ye do not come up to the manor, front door nor back, for any reason—I don’t care if ye torch yer fool head off!
I’ll not have the likes of ye meddle in the life I’m spinning. And if ye dare speak to me ever again, I’ll cry rape—don’t think I won’t, by God!”
“Do not flatter yourself,” he told her. “It is my fortune to have found true love—and to recognize it as such, compared to the besotted sickness you infected me with. I bid you luck with your avarice, and may you bid me same with my happiness.” He raised his chisel and returned to his work, and when the clump of damp earth she’d hurled hit his shoulders, he did not turn around.
There are various ways to retire virginity. It can slip away—the proverbial “it just happened!” You can exchange yours with a trusted friend’s, find out together what the big deal is about. You can blast it to smithereens, as Sin did—infatuated, obsessed, madly in lust. Or if you’re lucky, if you’re in love, you don’t “lose” anything but a tough scrap of skin a tampon no doubt already dispensed and you gain so much in body, mind, and soul. I was lucky like that. Incredibly lucky. I think I still am. So after Sin finishes his tale, I very deliberately put my arms around him and lay my cheek to his chest. That’s how lucky I am.
Then I slant my eyes at him. “So you never thought, not for a second, that your . . . acquaintance with Mae Molly and this craziness with Antonia might be, oh, I don’t know . . . connected?!”
“Connected?” He releases me to ponder this. “Why, no, not at all. Antonia was so young, and of high station, while Mae Molly was older—she must have been twenty at the time—and, well, in the terms of the day, a commoner. What connection could they possibly have?”
I shake my head. Of course he doesn’t see it. He wouldn’t, couldn’t, him being male. Women comprehend the physics of life: for every action a reaction, a relation, a ramification. We come with internal stew pots, inner kitchen sinks—we know it all goes into the mix. Men are built with hatches, drawers, shelves—they separate, compartmentalize. In the summer of 1768, two women lived in the same house, with strong feelings for the same man. To that man’s mind, they may as well have lived on different planets. To this woman’s mind—psychic leanings totally irrelevant—they were involved, had to be.
Now, by goddess, I’ve got to figure out how.
LX
Next stop, the library, where it’s more like the mortuary—
the typical Swoonie’s interest in literature must wane as summer progresses. Yet while I devote the next idle hours to how a particular mistress-servant situation applies to our current predicament, I come up empty. One recourse might be to probe Antonia more about her maid—maybe she and Mae Molly openly discussed Sin, and by openly discussed I mean further hair-pulling fisticuffs. Tread with caution if I go that route; Antonia won’t appreciate me poking around—she’s just as likely to shut down or flat-out lie than supply any solid info.
I hardly expect her to greet me with much enthusiasm, either, if she’s been on cleaning detail all day. Yet as I turn up the drive, someone’s obviously glad to see me, chasing my wheels in a tricolored collage. I toss the bike and call to her.
“Come here, you little furball!”
It’s been days. Which isn’t unusual. RubyCat appeared out of nowhere, a starving stray, and while she made herself right at home, she’d no way acclimate to full-time house-cat status.
Believe me, I tried—all the animal websites advise against letting your pet roam free, but when R.C. wants out, she wants O-U-T, vociferously, destructively. Now she comes and goes through the flap—usually with clockwork regularity. Only whenever I take off (the rare weekend in the city, my recent sojourn to Chester), she’ll disappear for the same stretch, like it’s payback. Fortunately it’s all good when we hook up again, frolicking on the lawn.
“Me! Me! Me!” she says.
And I’m like, “Huh?”
And she’s all “Hey! Me! Ma! Pet me! Now! Ma! Pet me!” This is bizarro. The feline brain being the size of a lima bean, it�
�s easy enough to grasp its wants and needs, be that a sample of your turkey sandwich, a rub under the chin, or to be left alone, please. Only RubyCat actually addresses me, and here’s what’s weirder: It’s funneling straight into my conscious. Never before have I experienced ESP in that government-secret-weapon kind of way (if I had I would’ve tailed certain teachers and notched more A’s). Now this cat is coming in loud and clear—
“Maaaaa! Me! Pet meeeee!”
All right, all right!
“Not therrrrre! Here! Mmm. Mm-hmm! Prrrm-prmm-prmm . . .”
Guess I hit the spot since she lapses into purr mode and all I’m receiving are motorized murmurs of content. Just to ensure it’s not some psychic hallucination, I ask, “So RubyCat, what you been up to?”
“Hmm? Me? Oh. Pop, Pea—hee-hee-hee!”
It takes a second, then I get it: Popcorn and Peanut are the Leonards’ excitable dogs; R.C. gets off on tormenting them when they’re tethered in the yard.
“Rabbit—fast, grrr,” she continues her travelogue. “Mouse—snack, yum. Sleep. Repeat.”
This is so cool! Useful, no—but definitely cool, definitely a goddess gift. As I send up appreciation to Arduinna/Diana/Whoever/I Forget, R.C. senses my wandering mind and, insulted, makes for the flap.
I wheel my bike to the shed and let myself in the back door. Washer and dryer both buzz industriously. The kitchen is spotless, as is our dining area. Here, by the telephone, a message in curly cursive: Pen, Bruise Blue, party, Wick. On to the living room, also picked up and slightly (irritatingly) rearranged, where I see Antonia in the bentwood rocker, bowed over my laptop.
“The house looks great,” I tell her. “Thanks.”
“You are most welcome. It isn’t difficult, housekeeping. I suppose that’s why the lower classes so often do it.” Could she be more ignorant? “Actually, Antonia, the lower classes, as you deem them, are relegated to unskilled labor because they lack education and opportunity, largely due to efforts by your so-called upper classes.” Just so she knows. Not that she cares.